Photo by Kylin Hanson
Simon Hanson (born February 11, 1955, Henley Beach, South Australia), longtime “professional student” in philosophy, retired schoolteacher, and currently ecological advocate and haikai and poetry practitioner. He has won top prizes in the NZPS’s Katikati Haiku Contest (2014) and International Poetry Contest (2017), the Kusamakura competition (2014 and 2015), the Jane Reichhold Prize (2016), the Betty Drevniok Award (2019), and the Irish Haiku Society Competition (five years, 2017–2022) among others. Hanson’s haikai have been featured in the Australian and New Zealand anthologies, the Red Moon anthologies and A New Resonance 12, Lee Gurga and Scott Metz’s annual anthologies, Bruce Ross’s A Vast Sky, Gabriel Sawicki’s Behind the Tree Line, and Jacqueline Pearce’s Last Train Home, to name a few. In 2011 he published a collection of free-form poetry. He collaborated with Ron C. Moss in Ancient Bloodlines, an ebook of rengay (2017) and produced an ebook of haiku, Desert Stones (2018). Previously secretary to the Australian Haiku Society (2017–2022), Hanson has served as coeditor of Echidna Tracks since 2018. He resides in Lilydale, Tasmania.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.